Taylor dominated key voting precincts

Mayor Ivy Taylor celebrates with supporters at a watch party on election night. Readers comment on her victory.

Mayor Ivy Taylor celebrates with supporters at a watch party on election night. Readers comment on her victory.

Photo: Edward A. Ornelas /San Antonio Express-News

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Taylor dominated key voting precincts

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In Saturday’s mayoral runoff election, no neighborhood drew more voters than Precinct 2084 on the city’s Northwest Side — an area where Mayor Ivy Taylor and Leticia Van de Putte had been evenly matched in the May 9 general election.

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In precinct after precinct across the North Side where voter turnout was strongest, Taylor scored solid victories against Van de Putte, according to preliminary election data released Monday.

Taylor also won many precincts on the East Side where she served as a city councilwoman but lacked endorsements from East Side political leaders who supported Van de Putte, a Democrat who resigned as state senator to run for mayor.

Van de Putte won the general election with nearly 26,000 votes — about 1,700 more than Taylor, with neither topping the 50 percent margin in a crowded field to avoid a runoff.

In the runoff, Taylor defeated Van de Putte with nearly 52 percent of the vote out of more than 98,000 ballots cast.

“Everyone thinks that Democrats were just automatically voting for Leticia,” said Taylor’s campaign manager, Justin Hollis. “And our polling and our data showed that was not the case.”

Precinct-by-precinct results in the runoff (click for vote totals):

The biggest precinct in the runoff was Precinct 2084, which is shaped like a trapezoid along Bandera Road outside Loop 410. Out of 766 voters who cast ballots, more than 60 percent supported Taylor. And more people voted there this time around — ballots increased by 11 percent compared with the general election.

The runoff results stood in stark contrast to the general election, when Taylor barely won a plurality in that precinct with 27 percent of the vote. Van de Putte came in second place with 26 percent.

That means nearly half the votes in that precinct went to someone else in the general election when 14 candidates were on the ballot. Former state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, won 22 percent of the vote, and former Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson, a Democrat, won 17 percent.

How many of those voters participated in the runoff was unclear Monday. One of the questions looming over the runoff was whether Villarreal’s die-hard supporters would support Taylor or Van de Putte — if they showed up to vote at all.

In the general election, Villarreal came in a close third-place behind Taylor with more than 22,200 votes and won 79 voting precincts.

Of those precincts, Taylor won 36 in the runoff election and Van de Putte won 43. The overall turnout in those precincts increased by more than 600 votes — but the increase was higher in the precincts won by Taylor.

Precinct-by-precinct results in the general election:

Voter turnout dropped in some precincts in the downtown area, where Villarreal’s support was strongest. Those were the same precincts Van de Putte won in the runoff.

Van de Putte’s campaign manager, Christian Archer, said thousands of new voters participated in the runoff election, and he believed many of them were Republicans who weren’t voting for Taylor as much as they were voting against Van de Putte.

“I think there were a lot of new voters who didn’t vote in the previous election who voted for the first time in the runoff,” Archer said. “And I think that the Republicans were able to galvanize and energize their base.”Hollis said there’s no question many conservative voters sided with Taylor. But he emphasized that’s not the entire explanation for Taylor’s victory.

“The reason Leticia lost is because Democrats didn’t vote for her,” Hollis said. “We knew a lot of people who voted for Mike were going to support us.”

Villarreal said it makes sense that many of his supporters sided with Taylor.

“These results don't surprise me,” Villarreal said. “I attempted to build a coalition of fiscal conservatives and social progressives. And we got very close.”